Tag: Artesian Solutions

Artesian Solutions implemented a set of technological upgrades to its sales intelligence service which provide speedier searches, more accurate sales triggers, and improved capacity. Artesian now employs Elasticsearch for its news and social media storage. According to the firm, “This has enabled it to dramatically scale up server capacity, boost the performance of its advanced architecture, and provided the ability to analyse, filter and deliver results from raw unstructured data. Search results that previously took 10 seconds now take just 10 milliseconds.”

Artesian Solutions enhanced their sales triggers with improved scoring and ranking algorithms while improved caching and load balancing allow the firm to expand concurrent users ten-fold without a degradation in performance.

The net result of these architectural enhancements is a 25X increase in historical content available for analysis and research and a five-fold increase in the speed of news query engines.

“We constantly feed back into our engineering team the learnings, preferences and needs of our customers, and in return they always deliver robust, superior performance enhancements that not only accelerate our R&D programme, but solidify our position as the market leader in sales intelligence software,” said Artesian CTO Steve Borthwick. “We’ve boosted the performance and accuracy of the Artesian platform across the board, improving raw speed and our ability to handle a significant number of simultaneous users, as well as optimising their ability to uncover those all-important golden nuggets of sales insight.”

Artesian CEO Andrew Yates recently discussed Artesian Solutions with Sudipto Ghosh as part of the MarTech Interview Series. Artesian was founded to help resolve the disparity between B2B buyer and seller tools. “We saw that businesses had transformed the way they buy, but that sellers had not adapted. This mismatch led us to create a vision of better B2B sales engagement that is customer-centric at its heart, and to develop the world’s most powerful customer intelligence application to support it.”

Yates described technology as “the biggest disruptive force in the world” and his entrepreneurship as “a desire to disrupt the status quo, solve problems, remove complexity and make a difference.” He sees Artesian Solutions as a “disruptive force for good in our sector, providing engagement smarts for companies and markets in the same way that LinkedIn has done for people insights.”

Artesian is incorporating new AI technologies into its platform including the Arti chatbot based upon IBM Watson. As they are doing so, they are repositioning from Social Selling to “A.I.-powered sales intelligence.”

Yates warns that businesses look for CRM platforms to help customer facing departments build customer-centric businesses and a full customer view. Often, though, they become frustrated when CRMs do not provide the desired customer experience and engagement. But CRMs are only as good as the data entered into them and are subject to ongoing data decay. Further compounding this issue is

“the sheer volume of data businesses need to grapple with. Often unstructured, this data is increasingly hard to find, rationalize and interpret. Inaccurate or out-of-date data has several inevitable consequences. Take-up and enthusiasm for CRM input wanes as the volume of data increases, and time spent just keeping up-to-date with existing customer data impacts negatively on time spent researching and acquiring new ones. Opportunities to respond to real-time customer news and market insight are missed, and customers looking for instant action and results are left disappointed. Likewise, deals are lost through mistakes, and errors in messaging and targeting become more frequent. Forecasting accuracy diminishes as emerging trends go unnoticed.”

Yates recommends working with a data partner that provides a full view of customers and contacts, including contextualized customer insight; news, market trends and social media monitoring; real-time intelligence; and single sourced company and contact profiles with “social profiles, opinions, and expectations.”

British sales intelligence vendor Artesian Solutions announced that it received £3.5M in expansion capital from Columbia Lake partners. The funds will be used to refinance current debt obligations and provide working capital for “further growth and expansion.” The refinancing also provides better terms and business flexibility after the firm reached a profitability milestone in July.

Artesian has begun integrating artificial intelligence into its tools. Earlier this year, it launched Insight Agent, “the first step in a series of intelligent chat bots aimed at automating many of the tasks carried out by B2B professionals” along with Arti, the firm’s interactive digital assistant.

“This is an exciting milestone in our company’s history and positively reinforces the leadership position we have attained. We are constantly looking at the ‘what next’ scenario, pushing boundaries to establish our business as one of the leading innovators in B2B software for commercial teams, this has paved the way for our new risk mitigation capabilities which will be released in the New Year.”

Artesian Solutions CEO Andrew Yates

The firm has recently shifted its positioning from social selling to “A.I. powered sales intelligence.”

“Social Selling sits at the heart of Artesian’s founding principles,” explained Yates. “But as sales best practice has evolved, so has Artesian. Our goal is to be at the forefront of technology evolution for enterprise B2B, delivering a suite of A.I.-powered tools to make prospecting, engaging and closing deals easier. As our forthcoming risk mitigation capabilities demonstrate, we will continue to evolve to ensure we remain a trusted partner of our enterprise customers and to maximise the impact of their business relationships”

Artesian responses tend toward the overly broad. A question about the news taxonomy provided a general overview of Artesian content and functionality.

British social selling service Artesian Solutions launched their new Arti chatbot (artesian.ai) this month. According to their press release, “Arti enables intuitive customer interaction in a relatively human-like way, answering questions about Artesian’s capabilities and providing expertise in real time. No longer do customers need to search through content on the company’s website, instead they can now interact directly with Arti and uncover the information they need in an instant.”

The Arti screen is split into two with the user keying questions on the left. A text response is displayed alongside the question as a British voice reads the answer. If there is ancillary content or videos, it is displayed in the right window.

“Our business is all about pushing the boundaries of web-based technology to deliver commercially valuable and immediately actionable insights for our customers,” said CEO Andrew Yates. “Telling the user what they need to know and the action they need to take, at the right time, means client facing teams can capitalise from every business moment. Arti is a great example of how the application of AI can be a significant enabler of productivity, lead generation and importantly enhanced customer experiences.”

A quick test proved disappointing with Arti misunderstanding basic questions such as “Which countries do you cover?” or “do you publish financials?” Many of the responses are tangential answers usually suggesting a “meeting with the team.” Of course, AI tools are able to learn and the content and response sets should improve over time. Thus, Arti users are likely to have better results in the future.

And as evidence of learning, the system has been updated to provide the following answer to “do you publish financials?”

We provide access to Experian credit ratings directly within Artesian, along with lots of other valuable information such as corporate family tree, shareholdings and detailed financial information.

“Arti is more than just a bit of fun, although we’ve certainly had fun building it,” said Director of Marketing Stuart Newton. “It has the potential to be an incredibly powerful marketing tool for us. Arti will continue to get smarter the more our customers engage with it, learning from previous conversations to become more effective and valuable to our web visitors. I am delighted to place Artesian amongst some of the leading brands in the world, leveraging chat bots to connect with customers. It will change the customer experience by replacing clicks with sustained conversations and personalised interactions.”

­­This is the last of a series of blog posts containing interview transcripts between Artesian Solutions CEO Andrew Yates and me. This excerpt discusses how Artesian drives high engagements rates across their multi-platform social selling service.

Andrew: I know, that’s true. It’s because we go beyond the 80/20 rule*. We work really, really hard to make sure that the interdependency with Artesian isn’t limited to a desktop or web app-based user interaction. We’ve invested a ton in things like optimization for mobile devices, smart calendar apps, real-time alerting, actionable insights from an alert and an action center that sits midway between the web app and the mobile app. Consequently, we keep people interested in using the service on a daily basis because there’s so many different ways to interact with it.

Also, our philosophy is a key differentiator. Others talk about this, but I don’t see them doing it. When we’re teaching users what to do with Artesian, we say, “If all you do is consume, then we’ve not done our job, and you’ve wasted your opportunity.” What we are encouraging you to do is think about how you can drive actions from the insight. If you drive action, good things will happen. Not only will we make it easy for you to drive actions, but we’ll also measure the outcome.

Everything you do in Artesian is tracked, as is everything you output. When you share a link or you share a piece of insight, not only does it come in a nice condensed form, but it’s fully trackable.

I know you’ve opened it. I know you’ve shared it. I can do the same thing on social media for posts to LinkedIn. I know how many people have clicked on it, how many people have viewed it. We give you all that feedback plus an influence score to really gratify you that you’ve done something great, and it’s working. That’s the big difference from just providing access to a service. What we are about is not force feeding the patient, but encouraging the user to interact with the service and really do something with the insight.

Andrew: Artesian Ready has about 25% penetration. That’s pretty good considering we mainly work with large enterprises, many of which place limitations on what you can do with your mobile device. The very fact that it’s an app is a barrier. That’s why in [the recently released version] 16.1 we’ve done a fully mobile-optimized version of the web app for the mobile phone. It’s not an app. You don’t need to download anything to use it and we don’t hit the buffers in terms of corporate [security].

Michael: And what percentage of your users are accessing Artesian through Salesforce?

Andrew: About 25%, which might surprise you, because what we found in the larger corporates is, we’ve introduced Artesian as an integrated part of our concept but people have said there’s a backlog, like a queue of apps that they want to get approved and installed. We tend to say to the customer, “Well, get going with Artesian standalone, then integrate it with Salesforce later.” That said, with the release of 16.0 which had the first Opportunity View integration, we’ve seen our Salesforce pipeline opportunities go from 20/80 to 80/20.

This is the last of four blogs derived from an interview of Artesian CEO Andrew Yates. The previous blogs covered:

The Artesian Solution Watchlist tags stories by trigger topics and allows users to filter by both triggers and topic cloud keywords.

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Artesian Solutions CEO Andrew Yates and discuss topics including how they fit into the sales intelligence space and being “customer curious.” Artesian provides a social selling solution for the UK, US, and Canada. Their sales intelligence is delivered via a web browser, Salesforce.com, and their Ready mobile app.

Michael: How do you view yourself versus firms in the sales intelligence space?

Andrew: I had a chat with [CEO] Henry [Schuck] from DiscoverOrg just recently. It took us a while to realize that we didn’t really compete with DiscoverOrg. We might compete for share of wallet. Certainly, some of the words on the website are saying [similar things]. Fundamentally, we’re two different types of organizations.

I think there are companies that make data, curate data, sell access to curated data. I would include in addition to DiscoverOrg, RainKing and InsideView.

I talked to Henry. I said, “Somebody would buy your service because they would want to get the inside track on when the projects are coming up, on particular types of initiatives. Who’s who in the zoo? What’s their phone number and email address?” The stimulus would be, “I’m contacting you to talk to you about this project on which I can help you.” [That’s] The bit where we take over guiding the conversations which follow over the remainder of the sales cycle, we can do that.

We use natural language processing, machine-based learning and AI to take data from people who already aggregate it. Then we take it through our own process because there isn’t anything out there that has anything like the superior capabilities we’ve got around topic classification, tagging, and all the things that go with our value proposition. As I said to Henry, “We’re never really going to compete directly because we’ve got no intention of hiring a bunch of people to build various specific data.”

I think he’s on fire at the moment…In the States, there’s a real shortage of quality contact insight. Where we take over is where DiscoverOrg leaves off. At the point where you’ve identified an opportunity in a customer and then you want to build that relationship and keep that relationship going over time not just maybe sell them one product or service but sell them multiple products or services and keep going back. That’s the area we’re really, really good at.

Michael: Okay. Right, so basically being aware of what’s going on in that organization and maintaining the relationship.

Andrew: Yes. That’s why we look for organizations, customers that we sell to who have a relationship management model at their heart. This “customer curious” concept came from one of our customers, NetApp. The chap that was running Europe came up with the phrase. He drew me this picture and said, “There’s three ways we can differentiate ourselves in the market. We can differentiate ourselves with products,” he said. “And NetApp’s got the same product that three or four other companies have got. We can do it with price, but that’s a race to the bottom or we can do it with service. We want to do it with service, and we want to be the best. The best company in this space. We can have a product that is good or better than anyone else’s, but we’ll differentiate ourselves by being customer curious.”

There’s nothing like getting inspiration for where your headed from a customer.

Michael: This topic is near and dear to Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff: being customer obsessed.

Andrew: Yes. Being customer obsessed is where we try to complement Mark Benioff’s vision. The Salesforce platform is an excellent system of record, and I think people buy CRM expecting it to help them sell, and it does. It helps them sell by getting more organized and orchestrated with the customer at the center, but it’s not a system of engagement. That’s really where we feel we come in as a complement and supplement to that system of record.

The interview will wrap up on Monday with a discussion of how Artesian maintains a very high engagement rate amongst its users.

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Artesian Solutions CEO Andrew Yates and discuss topics including artificial intelligence and risk tools they are integrating into their social selling service. This is the second in a series of interview excerpts I am publishing this week. On Monday, Andrew discussed Artesian’s 2016 entry to the US market.

Michael: You have recently begun to introduce AI capabilities into your platform.

Andrew: What we’ve done in our first incarnation of bot-driven AI is we’ve created something that we call an “insight agent” that, through an API into Salesforce, can build you a view of threats and opportunities within your pipeline. Which, in itself, is pretty damn useful; much more useful than a forecast report or a dashboard which is the way you see it in Salesforce today. Then we’ll lay out all of those deals by stage and value and overlay today’s new social and demographic context on top. That’s pretty useful.

With the latest release, we’ve created a bot which literally reads and interprets the news in relation to the stage of the sales process that you’re at. And, where it sees a particular trigger that has meaning in relationship to a particular stage, it flags that. Most organizations have implemented the concepts of sale stages when they’ve implemented CRM.

Typically, when I ask somebody, “how many stages do you have?” They’ll say, “between five and seven.” The system automatically builds you a view depending on how you’re implementing Salesforce, however many stages you’ve implemented and what you call them. Then what the bot does, is it crawls all over the news looking for things that could impact those opportunities at the stage they are at.

Let’s say, I’ve got a six-stage process where stage six is closed and stage five is a negotiation. Artesian’s insight agent finds out about a CIO who has left the business. The insight agent will notify the user that there’s a potential problem with the deal in their pipeline. The agent will tell them why there is a problem and how it’s been categorized. There’s half a dozen next-best actions that we bundle up with the insight as we deliver it. That’s our first attempt at taking the concept of machine-based learning and natural language processing, combining it with an AI bot, and trying to make that useful for customers.

We’ve introduced the ability for the user to customize their own topics, keywords, and trigger events. We offer a bunch out of the box, and we also wrap a managed service around it and easy implementation to every customer.

We’re also seeing a lot of activity in the “RegTech/RiskTech” arena with the growth of cybercrime and terrorism, and the sensitivity around regulation of any financial, FCA [UK Financial Control Authority] regulated [business]. There are regulations that organizations need to comply with. We’re increasingly being asked by our financial services customers, particularly the banks, to get deeper into being able to provide those capabilities inside of Artesian.

Organizations want to mitigate risks. They want to fall within the arena of whatever the regulation is and comply with the law, but they also want to exploit the technology as best they can to make sure they write the best business that they can. We’re doing some work at the moment in conjunction with one of our demographic data suppliers. What we’re looking to do is extend the capabilities in Artesian to provide some of the capabilities that our customers are asking for in the RegTech / RiskTech environment. We’re going to introduce risk agents. Risk agents look at the real-time present and it looks at the past. It specifically looks at things that are in-line with the regulations and also in-line with the stated risks that the customer has mapped out.

What that translates into is a service that is not only compelling in terms of customer acquisition, customer retention, and yield, but also compelling from a kind of, you don’t go to jail if you’re using Artesian because it’s doing the regulation and risk job for you as well.

Michael: When you say risk app, are you talking more about supplier risk, compliance risk, credit, reputational?

Andrew: There are 40 or 50 pretty big companies doing this thing already. What we’re talking about is company-centric intelligence, but also the people associated with that company and the intelligence that we’ll need to derive around whether something is risky or not. It could be the performance of a business. It could be some adverse news in relation to that performance. Or it could be that an individual who has a beneficial ownership, more than a 5% stake in a business, happens to be on a naughty list in terms of the PEP [Politically Exposed Persons] or sanctions.

At the moment, we have risk triggers in the opportunity view. They’re not compliance risk triggers. If you’re going to a client, they need to know about key beneficial ownership.

Michael: Is that part of the opportunity view or is that a new type of view?

Andrew: A new type of view. We have risk triggers in the opportunity view, but they’re not compliance risk triggers. If you go into a bank, they need to know about beneficial ownership, adverse news going back three years, PEP, sanctions, real-time alerts from stock exchanges. None of that is feasible within a generic instance of Salesforce.com in an opportunity view.

Michael: It sounds you’re looking to move beyond the sales and marketing teams to start to get to into things like onboarding, KYC [Know Your Customer], AML [Anti-money Laundering], PEP, and other compliance aspects that really go into monitoring of clients as well as the initial onboarding.

Andrew: Yes, if you go back to the whole customer curious mantra and deep relationship management, we like to say that we put the R back into CRM. We are all about that relationship.

The conversations we are having with our large customers would indicate we are on the right track with that.

The interview will be continuing over the next few days with discussions of what it means to be a “customer curious” business and how Artesian maintains a very high engagement rate amongst its users. Monday’s blog discussed Artesian’s 2016 entry into the US market.